Well whatever I was trying to remember from the end of the last post is probably long gone. Unless it's one of the things that will come up here! Which is possible, as it could get a bit wordy...
Time really flies when you're having fun, and otherwise keeping busy. I think about the devlog often, and I somehow tricked myself into believing that I had posted something in February.
"So, what's been cooking lately?"
ASTEROIDS
In the future of humanity, asteroid mining is likely to be a massive boost to large-scale construction and industry. That's just what happens when much-needed resources become much more accessible: massive growth. It's not just human nature, it's nature-nature!
It's also true (in theory) that precious metals that we find on earth are almost certainly not part of the earth's original formation material, but were actually deposited long ago by meteors and asteroids falling to the earth in late stages of formation.
Tangent
Why does this seem to be a solid theory? Why can't the gold we find be part of the early planet? During the middle-ish stages of planet formation when the planet was almost entirely molten rocky materials, heavy metallic material would have been mixed in with the rock all as a molten liquid mass during which any heavier-than-rock (heavy metal!) material would sink to the bottom of the gravity well, aka the planet's core. Over millions or billions of years, the early heavy metallic contents of the earth's mass would have sunk to the core while rocks remain on top. The molten phase of the earth is also why it's believed that most of earth's water and atmosphere came from asteroids and comets: at those temperatures the water and gasses would have been extremely light and volatile, allowing them to be boiled, ejected, and blown away. With such conditions present it leads to the conclusions that water, atmosphere, and precious heavy metals could only be present for us to find in the earth's surface if they were deposited after the crust had cooled and hardened enough for asteroids to [crash] land on without sinking and melting in with the rest of the mantle.
SO! With asteroids being sooo theoretically and probably important, shouldn't they also be important in the game? Well, I thought they should! So they will!
But how, exactly?
When I first put my mind to the idea I wasn't sure how to do it in a way that seemed clean and natural and not a forced gimmick. I wanted asteroid importance to really be a part of the game, especially after watching this video which reminded me about the significance of asteroid mining. It also taught me there are actually people right now in the real world who are really actually laying the first foundations towards very real asteroid mining! Anyway.... I couldn't come up with any resolution about asteroids for a long time, until a few days ago when it just hit me while I was cleaning: surface-to-space launches. As in reality, launching rockets is expensive, and the more weight you want to lift into space the more it costs! UNIVERSE will mimic this in some fashion, roughly, by having an appreciable cost to launch materials and ships directly into space from a planet. What this means for asteroids is the value of asteroid mining comes with large-scale ship production, through the concept of logistics. Moving large quantities of material from asteroids to orbital shipyards will be much more practical (cost, time, volume) than launching from a planet to its orbital shipyards.
But that's not the only gold nugget we'll find in asteroids.
Going back to that idea of planetary formation, it's probably fair to suggest that most asteroids live in - or come from - asteroid belts. If we run with the idea that precious resources on planets (and large moons) come from asteroids, and asteroids come from asteroid belts ... then perhaps planets closer to asteroid belts might receive more asteroids, and solar systems with more asteroid belts might see more resources deposited onto their planets. Hmm, yes, perhaps...
RESOURCES
One of the aspects of UNIVERSE that I honestly believe will make this game work and keep working and evolving for a long time is the matter of simplicity. Other games of this genre are too simple, and so after months or years of playing the game people eventually get bored and leave, ultimately because it's simple and there's virtually no room for being creative or clever. Once you've done everything there is to do and seen everything there is to see, there comes a point where investing a lot more time just doesn't pay off like it used to. UNIVERSE will combat the rot of simplicity, and it will do so by maintaining a mild level of complexity.
A long time ago, I said that there would be four resources. I recently decided to change that, and am now deciding on a few more resources, splitting the concept of the previous resources into a few more varieties. The spread of base resources I'm imagining right now might look more like this:
- Volatiles
- Light Ore
- Heavy Ore
- Precious Ore
- Rare Minerals
- Oxysilicate Minerals
These 'base resources' would actually count as raw materials, which would then be processed (often in some combination with each other) to produce other resources which would then be used in other production and manufacturing. For example, "Volatiles" alone represents various substances which could be turned into things like "Atmosphere" which your starship crews might appreciate, or water and other chemicals necessary to refine ores into their respective products like "Light Metals" which might be used a lot in aircraft or "Structural Metals" which would go well into building large structures and starship armour plating. The list of significant 'production materials' that I'm imagining [while typing on the verge of passing out] looks something like:
- Atmosphere
- Water
- Reactants
- Concretes
- Light Metals
- Structural Metals
- Precious Metals
- Rare Metals
These lists aren't finalized, but I do know for sure that I'll need to revisit the formation of solar systems, at least touching on resources and asteroids. The general formation strategy that I spent several painful weeks perfecting shouldn't change too much; though I do want to look at tweaking stellar and planetary masses to base them on real units instead of the vague arbitrary units I have in effect right now.
I'm not implementing these new resources just 'for the fun' of making things more complex. I also like to try modelling a bit of realism into the game, and more than that, I want/expect the inter-player economy in the game to be lively and meaningful, and having a variety of resources to need and produce and exchange will contribute toward this end.
MODULES ..?
I'm also playing with the idea of another form of starship construction, which would probably come as a later addition to the game: modules. Modules would be pre-built sections of a starship - such as weapon systems, engines, power plants, armour plates, and shield emitters - that players could trade in local markets. It would probably be a separate market 'zone' than resources as they would be more complex, but it would allow players to try specializing in some technologies and developing very low-cost or high-power modules and selling them in markets. On the other side of that coin players might choose to specialize in some technologies by intentionally neglecting others, trading with neighbours for certain modules instead of building their own.
With modules, you would be able to make interesting or useful items that you could trade with others, or perfect to your own standards for your own ships. I would even consider giving some cost advantages to modules, saying that a 'mass production' operation producing a module would cost a bit less than custom-building the equivalent piece into a ship. It's all just an idea, but it's an idea that I like and hope that others will also enjoy.
AND
With a lot of stuff going on around me right now, it's hard for me to make updates regularly, as has been the case for the past year. I'm not happy with having basically missed the 2nd birthday, and with not having a playable beta yet, but life... That being said, I'm trying really hard lately to work through things and am hoping to start scheduling - on a calendar - regular blog posts starting in April, even if it's only once per month I really want to do at least one per month. Also, I have the birthday on my calendar so I won't miss that. I'm really hoping and really working hard at it... I'm going to try getting more MORE re-focused on the project around the time of THE THIRD BIRTHDAY (which would be April 20) and really honour it well. The third birthday of the third build of The UNIVERSE Project...
Wish me luck! o7
